The following article appeared
in the October 1980 issue of Musician's Only magazine.
The author was Chris Welch.

No breach of
copyright is intended through the reproduction of this article/interview.
Copyright lies entirely with the original author and publication - it is
reproduced here for non-profit purposes only and to share with
Sting/Police fans and will be removed immediately upon the request of the
author or publication.

Thereís nobody between us and the Beatles now!' An ecstatic Stewart
Copeland, surveying the battlefield of rock is convinced that The Police
are fast approaching Beatle status.

As their album Zenyatta
Mondatta and single Don't Stand So Close To Me, top the charts
within hours of release. The Police have consolidated the amazing success
story of the past two years. And now fans are anxiously awaiting their
unique charity show in a circus tent, at London's Oval Cricket ground,
scheduled for next December. The Police have gained the widest ranging
audience since Beatles days, from hysterical teenyboppers to serious music
students. And they are thoroughly enjoying both success and
adulation.

Stewart, their drummer, told
Musicians Only at his West London home this week: "We've broken all
existing records, attendance-wise and record-wise. In England we're almost
too successful now. In America we appeal to an older audience the old
sophistos who are really into the group. Every time we play New
York, guys like Carlos Santana and Chick Corea turn up to see us. We're
considered the hip revolutionaries! But in, England weíre too successful
to be hip anymore.

Copeland risks sounding cynical
and conceited. But his opinions are delivered with a disarming mix of
tongue in cheek humour and enthusiasm. Heís unnervingly sharp and quick
witted. As an American raised in Beirut, he could speak Arabic before he
could speak English. His interests range from the mechanics of the pop
industry to Middle East politics, from making his own movies to building
his own recording studio.

"Iím restless," says Stewart.
"I have to be doing something the whole time. The only problem I have in
life at the moment is finding the inspiration to write more songs. I guess
you need to be hungry to write good songs, and The Police arenít hungry
any more!"

It was a bleary eyed Stewart
who greeted me at his front door on a sunny midday. "I've just got up -
how did you guess?" But numerous cups of coffee and cigarettes revived him
and soon the Copeland dynamic drive was shifting into gear, as we talked
and roamed around his small terraced house which a previous
architect-owner had cunningly enlarged by tinkering with walls and split
levels. He'd even dug out a basement, ideal for Stewart's own recording
studio, where he spends hours building up tracks featuring himself on
drums, bass and keyboards.

Copeland's eyes bore right
through you as he delivers his views with rapid, unblinking force. Then
he'll pause, to test that this guest is taking it all in and hasn't lapsed
into daydreams or lost the thread. He'd make an excellent anchor man on
Panorama or News Night and you could imagine him armed with maps putting
Complex economic and military situations into perspective.

But he's just as happy to talk
about more mundane matters like the way the new Police album was put
together, how his drumming style has developed and the personality
problems affecting the group - their arenít any.

"No, we don't hate each other
yet," says Stewart with a smile. But he revealed that within the ranks of
The Police, powerful forces were at work, bringing out the best in each of
them, as they ensured that each was pulling his weight. Anybody who
slacked off or opted for the easy ride was just as liable to get squashed
as any member who pushed his views too hard.

Stewart admitted that getting
two number one hit albums in a row posed the problem that if they didn't
get another instant smash next time they would be considered to be on the
way down. "It isn't a pressure because itís all good news. When it gets to
number one, itís a release of pressure. But it sets a precedent and means
the next one must get there too. As far as my own self esteem is concerned
it doesn't really matter all that much."

Stewart explained that they had
a month in the Wisseloord Studios in Hilversum to record the album. "We
finished the album at four in the morning, and later the same day we
played the first gig of our last tour. Which gives you an idea of how fine
we cut it."

Did they record in Holland to
get away from interruptions and phone calls, as Genesis producer David
Hentschel recently suggested?

"Well thatís a wonderful
reason. Thatís the only reason. NoÖ there are lots of good studios in
Britain but it doesn't make financial sense to record here. Even working
abroad can lead to trouble." Explained Stewart: "When the tape came back
into England it was in the boot of the roadies' car, in with a lot of
other stuff. The customs saw the big two-inch tape with Police written all
over it they said, ĎAh ha, you are trying to import this without declaring
ití. And it was just a piece of second-hand tape worth ten quid. But they
said it was the new big selling Police album and slapped a value of thirty
grand on it. But the fact is, it was just a piece of old tape. The quarter
inch tape with the mix-down on it is worth the thirty grand or whatever
and that was back in Holland. Anyway they reckoned it was illegal and
slapped a huge fine and confiscated the tape. They were welcomed to it
because we had finished with it anyway.

"But thatís the sort of
attitude that makes it impossible to work here, and why all the artists
leave town. This is the country that generates all the talent. In my
opinion it's the most important country, twenty times over America, as a
source of talent. Itís one of the things England does best and ought to
nurture instead of discouraging legislatively. In Sweden for example, Abba
are recognised as a major national industry."

The episode didn't hold up the
album and A&M paid the fine. "But it was a way of getting us, and
there's no reason why they should want to get us. I suppose it's a story
they can tell their mates when they get home. Most of the time we get
treated like royalty and the doors open for us, but sometimes you have a
lot of fluster and extraneous bullshit. If you don't have a lot of signed
albums and photographs to hand over to an official, he takes it
personally, whereas he wouldn't give a shit if it was Dexy's Midnight
Runners passing through." Stewart allowed himself a mildly malicious
grin.

The new album has a remarkably
'clean' and sparse sound, with a beautifully nurtured drum and guitar
presence, I observed. "Yeah, it doesn't have any of the heavy metal that I
suppose was on the first two albums. But there are plenty of groups
providing that already. There's not fuzzy guitar anywhere this time.
The World Is Running Down for example started out as a heavy jazz
number and then we Policeified it. We always do lots of overdubbing and
employ the studio techniques to the fullest and there's a lot of cosmetic
surgery on the tapes. We fill up the 24 tracks and more because we bounce
down and by the end you could count up to forty or fifty tracks. But we
don't use them all. By the mixing stage thatís when we lose a
few."

It seemed that the drum sound
was particularly prominent and Stewart had no shame about this. "Well
thatís my usual contribution. You could set up a recording of me in the
studio shouting ĎMore snare drumí. No I don't think the vocals are too far
back. You can hear them okay. They are an important ingredient, I suppose.
But a lot of bands forget that the drums are supposed to be loud. Itís not
just that the drummer gets some attention - the beat is really important.
It doesn't have to be loud so much as there. Think of Fleetwood Mac and
the Beatles. The drums were always positive and loud on their
records."

I noticed that on some tracks
Stewart stopped playing snare drums and just held the beat on bass drum
and cymbals for a few bars. "I do that quite a bit because the back beat,
which all drummers are brought up on, is important, unless you can provide
another pulse which is understandable. Itís easy to do. There are other
things that will provide a pulse, a rhythmic hook to hang everything else
on. The back beat has always done it in rock and roll up to now, but the
watershed in drumming, which West Indian music has brought about means
it's no longer so important. Alternatives have been discovered, such as
bass drum four in the bar. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And instead of a back
beat on two and four, a rimshot on three."

Stewart revealed that in the
studio when putting down backing tracks he used a drum box but this was
never used on the final product. "Sometimes Sting and Andy will put down
some chords with a drum box playing. But we don't keep it in because it
always sounds like a drum box. I'd rather duplicate it myself. Another of
our favourite techniques, like on Message In A Bottle, is to record
the song four or five times in a row without any kind of form. Just verse,
chorus, middle eight - playing the different segments of the song in
random order for twenty minutes and kind of build up a momentum. That way
You don't think ĎThis is the take.í You can try a few things and when
you've got twenty minutes down, get out the scissors and chop it all down.
It's cheating, but then we're making records. On stage we can't do that
and that's when we have to show we can actually play. And the general
opinion is we are much better on stage than in the studio. So I suppose
that means we can actually play the instruments."

One curious aspect of the
Zenyatta material was the number of fade-outs employed at the end
of virtually every number. Stewart was refreshingly frank about this. Most
musicians tend to get defensively hostile or outraged if you even hint at
some flaw or imperfection in their genius.

"We often record ten tracks and
find that there isn't a single number with en ending. We all scratch our
heads and try and think of some endings. So somebody makes a cup of tea,
we change the subject and never get around to it. A fade is a good way out
because the tune never finishes in your head. I don't mind fades. Itís a
kind of cop out I s'pose. But itís not serious. I think we can be forgiven
for that. Some of the tunes you'll notice, like Canary In A Coal
Mine and World Is Running Down run straight all the way
through, without any fluctuation in the beat. The drum pattern could have
been a tape loop."

Stewart says he can get off on
playing a 4/4 beat for hours and does a lot of it on the road. It's
something that requires more practice than rolling round the kit. Thatís
just icing on the cake. You have tokeep the beat and keep your ear s
tuned. You have to lock in to a beat, dum-cha, dum-dum-cha," says Stewart
began to vocalise a ferociously solid beat. The boy undoubtedly has
rhythm. "I can play that for hours," he said, recovering. "But speeding up
and slowing down are weaknesses of mine." I was surprised at this
revelation from a drum master.

"I suppose most drummers suffer
from it, but I worry less about it. A lot of our tracks speed up and slow
down, which makes the later editing stage more difficult. I usually speed
up. Well itís organic innit," he said slipping in to his West London
accent. The echo gadgets I use on stage have done a lot towards improving
my consistency of tempo. But if I get excited, I tend to speed
up."

Stewart denied that he used any
overdubbing on his tricky closed hi-hat patterns on his album, although he
had in the past, causing problems for those drummers who have tried to
copy Police arrangements. "I heard an album in a series called something
like Top of The Pops where they hired session musicians to play all the
current hits. I donít know how they made it cheaper that way but they only
have to pay session fees and publishing royalties. Their Message In A
Bottle is really a killer because all of the drum fills are totally
random, and there is this drummer who has learned them all studiously and
they're all present and correct. The poor guy, it must have been hard for
him to work out the meaning of all those noises, crashes and bangs. 'Cos I
do a few percussion overdubs on our records. If there isn't enough bang
when a verse goes into the chorus, I'll overdub cymbal and bass drum and
go "kerrrash," at the beginning of the chorus."

Stewart uses syndrums, two
digital echo machines, claptraps, and as he says, "almost as many knobs
and gadgets and flashing lights as Andy. I don't use the syndrums in the
normal way. I use it on the bass drum, tuned so it goes 'bow'. A kind of
electronic enhancement of the bass drum sound. Also in long jams, I've
been known to make sci-fi noises with it. Through the echo it sounds
pretty neat. I've now got repeat hold; which I used on the last tour and
means the drums literally go into auto-pilot. I can jump off the kit and
run around the stage holding the claptrap to get synthetic clapping, while
the drums are automatically pounding through the PA. Itís a great pose.
And itís dynamite to be able to run around halfway through the set and
stretch my legs and see what the audience looks like from close up. Iíve
been on stage four years now and never been closer than five feet. I can
shake a few hands and kiss a few babies.

How were The Police standing up
to the work load, which included their remarkable world tour to Egypt and
India, and the success rate? "Pretty well. We moan about being away from
home so much but thatís part of being any band. At least we can afford
telephone calls home. But we're bearing up pretty well. Morale is high and
we're not hating each other yet. We've got the Oval concert coming up
soon. It was suggested when we were at Milton Keynes by Harold Pendleton.
We had already wanted to do a show in a tent even though itís going to be
in December. So we'll do a show at the Oval in a great big heated
tent."

Why a tent for God's
sake?

"Because other venues in London
are just not Öadequate. I've never really enjoyed a concert at Wembley.
Even when Stevie Wonder played there. But you can get a really good sound
in a tent. We did some in France. The first gig Sting and I ever did with
Andy was in a tent, in a band called Strontium 90 - another one of our
scams. That was in the early days when we perniciously sold our musical
talents in return for transportation to France. Strontium 90 was really a
Gong reunion. They had all the different line ups of Gong, and the
spin-off groups which included us, patched together for the show. While we
were there with our equipment we did five or six Police gigs as well and
then used the plane tickets theyíd given us to get home. That's the story
of The Police all the way down the line. It seems like a long time ago now
but it actually isn't."

One problem The Police have
learned to surmount is bad reviews and hostile criticism from the jealous
and professional hatchet-persons. "We used to want to kill if we got a bad
review but now we've got over that. It's all entertainment. I may hate
what somebody says about me in the newspapers but it's all part of
entertainment. The press is like a mirror and you donít always like what
you see." Stewart disappeared towards the kitchen to make more coffee and
we continued our conversation at a shout. Did Zenyatta Mondatta
mean anything? I bellowed.

"It means everything," he
yelled back. "It's the same explanation that applies to the last two. It
doesnít have a specific meaning like ĎPolice Brutalityí or ĎPolice
Arrestí, or anything predictable like that. Being vague it says a lot
more. You can interpret it in a lot of different ways. Itís not an attempt
to be mysterious, just syllables that sound good together, like the sound
of a melody that has no words at all has a meaning."

I suggested that Jomo Kenyatta
might be good for their next project, and Stewart listed some of the
rejected titles they had come up with. "Miles (Stewartís brother and group
manager) came up with "Trimondo Blondomina". Very subtle. Geddit? Like
three blondes and the world. Then somebody thought of "Caprido Von
Renislam". That rolls off the tongue. It was the address of the studio.
That lasted until next morning."

We descended into the basement
to inspect Stewart's music room and recording studio. Tucked in the bay
under the upstairs window was a small drum kit which he showed no
inclination to play at such an unmusicianly hour of the day. His regular
kit is a Tama outfit, which make he has been playing for several years.
"Tama are really innovative as far as design goes, and expanding the whole
instrument using synth drums and oddly shaped drums. Theyíre still
exploring the technology of drums whereas the other companies' drums are
designed by retired jazz drummers who just didn't understand that todayís
drum set gets a lot more wear and tear. Tama are up to date and they sound
better. I have really thick wood shells on my drums and some of them are
9-ply. I've got three of their kits. The first one they gave me way back
in Curved Air days and the second one I bought because I needed a kit in
America and it was cheaper to leave one there. The third one they gave me
back in England. But if they were to cut me off, I'd still go out and buy
a Tama set."

Stewart has his drums very
tightly tuned and despairs of the tendency of most rock drummers to tune
their toms very low. "You can't hear them, they just don't cut through. So
I have mine tuned very tight and without the PA they sound like tin cans.
But with the PA you can fake a lot of roll on bass and get a very fast
response while they still sound heavy. Thatís what I like about Tama. They
have a heavy sound on very small drums. I use three tom toms on the front
and one on the floor. That's plenty. Some guys use eight, but there just
isn't any difference. And I'm much too busy for any stuff like rolling
round eight tom toms! You can get that effect just the same on four drums.
Sandy Nelson used to do that all the time. Ginger Baker only had four and
he was Mr Tom Tom. My snare drum I keep rock hard too. It's really easy
for my roadie to tune my drums. He just tightens everything until his
knuckles turn white. My roadie is Jeff Seitz and he's a really good
drummer himself. All our roadies are good musicians and you get to a
soundcheck and find them playing Message In A Bottle."

Stewart explained the working
relationship between him, Andy and Sting. "We don't have to shout at each
other but you have to have a good record of being right. If you are wrong
then you've wasted everybody's time and you feel like a twit, and the
other two definitely rub it in. So there's a lot of pressure to be right.
On the other hand if any of us sits back and doesn't put in ideas, whether
wrong or right, then they start getting hassled as being baggage. We
definitely ride on each other, all the time.

"I'll turn up with songs, but
Sting turns up with many more songs. On the last album I had three songs
and Sting had ten. But for a start, I have trouble with words, because I'm
not singing them myself, and I have a hard time putting myself into his
shoes and trying to write a song which would mean something to him. I'm
automatically in a false situation, unless I try and sing it myself and I
personally don't like my own voice. I don't like the noise my larynx makes
and I'm embarrassed. So I can't write songs for myself to sing. Besides,
why should I sing when there's Sting around? But I participate on Sting's
material."

Stewart has a 28 channel Allen
& Heath Syncom desk and when he first set up his home studio he got
hold of a load of second hand tape which included some stuff by Siouxsie
& The Banshees. Bombs Away was written on a Siouxsie & The
Banshees backing track. I changed the speed and did things to the EQ to
change the drum pattern. So with the desk I can get my song playing, then
press a switch and there's Siouxsie singing away."

But these are just fun and
games for Stewart in between the hard work of keeping Police out on the
beat. "Younger and younger kids are coming to the gigs, but I don't think
we're losing any of our older audience. Itís funny, in America, the local
versions of Julie Burchill hate the Cars, because they reckon thatís where
the Police should be at, whereas in England we're the ones too popular.
There isn't any competition. A year ago it was us against Blondie and
Elvis Costello. We were in the top thirty bands, along with Led Zeppelin
and Pink Floyd. Now, as far as Europe is concerned, there isn't anybody
between us and the Beatles. We've broken all existing records as far back
as the Beatles, at this point, in terms of speed of record sales, the kind
of hysteriaÖ There hasn't been such a clear lead for one group, ahead of
all the rest. The last group who had a clear lead were Queen, but we're
bigger now than Queen were then. We're probably bigger than Led Zeppelin
too, because they never had any teen appeal or hysteria. I suppose the Bay
City Rollers had hysteria, but they didn't have any music. The fact that
we combine those two things, means we have pushed back as far as the
Beatles. We'll never surpass them of course. They beat us to
it!"

Stewart despairs of America in
terms of bringing out new bands. "We're still the hot new band there, and
itís three years since we first toured the States. Since then there has
been the 2-Tone thing. But we're still their top new band."

He must be satisfied with life
and feeling fulfilled. "In some respects. But success leads to
dissatisfactions of a different kind. Sometimes the ideas don't come, and
artistically, I'm suffering from a lack of hardship! Here I am in a
beautiful house with a car and I can do whatever I want, but I can't
because what I want is to write tunes, and that doesn't get any easier."